Do the Arts Speak Truths?

Theories of censorship tend to describe censorship as a force of proscription or exclusion, imposed from above: a supervening authority, a bureaucracy, the demotic mob, corporate media, etc, produces a barrier against talking, acting or behaving in the way we want to or what needs to be said. This article looks at cultural politics in India at two critical moments of its history: in the 1950s, when major state institutions of culture – the Akademis, the National School of Drama, etc – were first established under the ‘liberal’ aegis of the Nehruvian administration; and at the turn of the 1990s, when these institutions might be said to be undergoing a certain crisis owing to major shifts in the governmental arrangement, accompanied by severe challenges from civil society groups and the right. Taking up the relevant archives – the cultural seminars on dance, music, drama and film hosted by the Indian government in the 1950s; the artist-activist group Sahmat; the Haksar Committee deliberations of 1988–1989 – the article argues that this modernist vision of censorship as a form of interference in what is otherwise the potential, pure transmissibility of speech, is a fallacy. Censorship is inherent in any social contract. To the extent that each of the above institutions were created to instigate and support a culture and aesthetics of freedom, to the extent that they were mandated to infuse various cultural forms of the country with the liberal constitutional spirit, they also represent mandates for censorship. Rather than describing censorship in terms of ‘vertical’ prophylaxes between above and below, the article argues that censorship must be seen rather as a dissipated force, appearing where certain concentrations of power or agreements establish themselves, even if, or rather precisely, in the interest of supporting the liberal or inclusive ethos of free speech. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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